Access Paths for Efficient Ordering with Large Language Models

Abstract: We present the LLM ORDER BY operator as a logical abstraction and study its physical implementations within a unified evaluation framework. Our experiments show that no single approach is universally optimal, with effectiveness depending on query characteristics and data. We introduce three new designs: an agreement-based batch-size policy, a majority voting mechanism for pairwise sorting, and a two-way external merge sort adapted for LLMs. With extensive experiments, our agreement-based procedure is effective at determining batch size for value-based methods, the majority-voting mechanism consistently strengthens pairwise comparisons on GPT-4o, and external merge sort achieves high accuracy-efficiency trade-offs across datasets and models. We further observe a log-linear scaling between compute cost and ordering quality, offering the first step toward principled cost models for LLM powered data systems.